Early in his career Adam Patch had married an anemic lady of thirty,
Alicia Withers, who brought him one hundred thousand dollars and an
impeccable entre into the banking circles of New York. Immediately and
rather spunkily she had borne him a son and, as if completely
devitalized by the magnificence of this performance, she had thenceforth
effaced herself within the shadowy dimensions of the nursery. The boy,
Adam Ulysses Patch, became an inveterate joiner of clubs, connoisseur of
good form, and driver of tandems--at the astonishing age of twenty-six
he began his memoirs under the title "New York Society as I Have Seen
It." On the rumor of its conception this work was eagerly bid for among
publishers, but as it proved after his death to be immoderately verbose
and overpoweringly dull, it never obtained even a private printing.
This Fifth Avenue Chesterfield married at twenty-two. His wife was
Henrietta Lebrune, the Boston "Society Contralto," and the single child
of the union was, at the request of his grandfather, christened Anthony
Comstock Patch. When he went to Harvard, the Comstock dropped out of his
name to a nether hell of oblivion and was never heard of thereafter.
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